Repairs continue at US Dow’s Texas City site following outage

HOUSTON (ICIS)--Several production units remained shut down on Monday at Dow Chemical’s Texas City operations while the site flare underwent repairs following an outage, the company said.

“Dow’s Texas City operations continue to make repairs to the site flare, which was found to be damaged following a steam outage last Thursday,” said company spokesman Kyle Bandlow. “The steam outage was the result of an electrical event, which prohibited Texas City operations’ third-party supplier from providing steam to the site.”

Bandlow continued, “To safely repair the flare, Texas City Operations has shut down several units. Teams are working around the clock to make the necessary repairs, and the site expects that it will resume start-up operations within the next couple of days.”

The Texas City operation has eight plants manufacturing more than 2.2bn lb/year (998,000 tonnes/year), according to Dow’s website.

The Texas City operation manufactures more than 30 chemical products, including isopropanol (IPA), and aldehydes, organic acids and vinyl acetate (VAM).

Annual production at the site includes 365,000 tonnes of vinyl acetate, 255,000 tonnes of butanol, 430,000 tonnes of isopropanol, and other materials, according to ICIS plants and projects.